Why Love Turns to Hate

"Relationships are essentially a balancing act between love and hate."

"Haters are just confused lovers."

"You have to love someone to hate them."

"The opposite of hate is not love, it is indifference."

"If you hate someone, you still care." And the list goes on and on.

It is no secret that people who we experience being loved by the very most sometimes become our most ardent haters. To the extreme end of this, just look at crimes of passion. A husband who once showed love towards his wife, kills her when she cheats on him. A wife who once showed love towards her husband, does anything she can to ruin his reputation amongst society. Divorce courts are absolutely filled across the world every day with people who seem to have once loved each other but whom now hate each other with ardent passion.

HATE IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF LOVE

Vibrationally speaking, fear is the opposite of love. In fear, oneness cannot be experienced. It creates closed-ness in the being and a perception of separation. Vibrationally speaking, hatred is not the direct opposite of love. Hatred is in fact more in the middle range of vibrations. Hatred is the opposite of positive perception. It is negative perception of and perspective about something. At its core, hatred is the result of feeling hurt by something and therefore perceiving what hurt you as a threat (against you). You cannot perceive something as being a threat to you and not perceive it as “different to you”. This is why when people perceive themselves as a threat they instantly experience a feeling of having a demon or some other threatening aspect of identity inside themselves. This is also why when you say you both love and hate someone, you instantly perceive that person as fragmented (into parts) so that you can be close to one aspect of them and hate the other.

THE MOST ATTACHED PARENT IS THE LEAST UNCONDITIONALLY LOVING

We learn about love from our earliest experiences in life. It is assumed that the minute a parent has a child, just because it is their child, they will love that child. This is not true. What is more accurate is that most all parents experience an immediate attachment to their child mentally, emotionally and also physically. But as most of you who have been into spiritual practice for any amount of time know, attachment and love is not the same thing. Attachment can happen along side love but it can also happen in the absence of love, especially if there is fear present.

Because society is ignorant to the difference between attachment and love, society often falls under the spell of perceiving that the best parents, the ones who love their children the most are the ones who are in fact the very most attached to them. Contrary to our assumption, this kind of parent in fact often unconditionally loves their children the very least. To this parent, the children are nothing more than an extension of themselves. The child is loved based on the condition of carrying out the parent’s own boundaries, wants, needs, likes, dislikes and values etc. This is not love. This is identification. The parent is so identified with their child; they will stop at nothing for the sake of their child. We look at this and say “wow, what a dedicated and wonderful parent. Isn’t that child lucky.” No is the answer. Under the pretense of love, their child either becomes nothing more than a projection of them so as to stay loved, or is rejected. We need to stop calling things love, when they are not in fact love.

HOW SHAME BECOMES OUR IDENTITY

Many people have children because on a subconscious level, doing so bolsters their own self-esteem. As long as their child is doing and saying things that validate the parent (continues to bolster their self esteem), the parent will experience love for their child. But the minute the child begins to do or say things that invalidate the parent (withdraw from their self esteem), the parent will immediately perceive the child as a threat to them. The parent will feel as if the child is betraying and abandoning the connection they had. The parent will feel separate from the child (abandoned) and experience hatred towards their own child as a result. This is especially common in the ages where a child is developing healthy individuation (figuring out their own boundaries)… Such as the toddler and teen years.

The child often has no idea what they have done to fall out of favor. He or she will feel confused as to why they suddenly fell from grace. The child will feel even more confused when the parent says things like “I love you” or “Of course I love my child” or “I love you but I just don’t like you” when in fact, their experience is that their parent is in fact their antagonist (hater). The parent has in fact turned against their own child and either subconsciously or consciously blamed the child as a justification for them doing it. As a result, the child has no other way to make sense of the situation other than to assume that the parent must be right, that there must in fact be something wrong with or bad about them. Shame then becomes the imprint embedded within this child’s being. He or she carries it with them into adulthood.

Why does the child make this assumption? Because to not make this assumption is to face the fact that their parent never actually loved them. But instead, loved something they or their presence DID for them. There is a tormenting powerlessness that comes with this awareness. You cannot emotionally live in an environment where you are not loved by the very people upon whom your life depends. So we adopt the belief that they love us, but that there is something bad and wrong about us and that is why they are treating us the way they are treating us. At least, by doing this we can feel some kind of control over the situation. We can believe that if we just do right or become good instead of bad, all that will be left between them, and us is love.

WE LEARN HOW TO LOVE FROM OUR PARENTS

Love and hate become integrally linked inside of our being. We begin to suffer from what many psychologists would call a disorganized attachment. I, personally think that disorganized attachment is much more common than psychologists believe. But like all things, depending on the level of threat a parent posed to a child, this attachment style presents stronger in some than in others and so we are only recognizing the extreme end of this condition.

When our parents had us to bolster their own sense of self in some way, we did not experience the kind of love we were looking for. We experienced the kind of love that was entirely dependent on us bolstering their sense of self. And those of who failed to do that with their parents inevitably find themselves alone and unable to escape the imprint of shame.

And the bottom line is that even though love is natural to every being in existence, we learn HOW to love from the people who give us our first taste of love. If our first taste of love is conditioned upon us bolstering someone else’s sense of self, we will love based on the condition that they bolster our sense of self. We will also fall in love with partners and connect with friends who only love us based on the condition that we bolster their sense of self until we become conscious of another way to be. And the minute someone in our lives does not bolster our sense of self, we will hate them. And the minute we do not bolster their sense of self, they will hate us.

CONDITIONAL AND UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

We need to talk of conditional and unconditional love. At our current stage of evolution, the average physical human finds the concept of unconditional love too abstract to actually practice. We already said that on a purely vibrational level, to love is to take something as thyself. It is the experience of oneness in singular form. And what causes that oneness is a state of appreciation. Essentially a positive perception of and perspective about that thing. Conditional love means that a person experiences a state of appreciation and positive perception of and perspective about something so as to experience themselves as one with that thing only if that thing is meeting some condition (such as making me feel good about myself or keeping me safe or liking me). Not to say that they absolutely do not exist, but I am yet to meet a person walking the planet who is doing other than this.

Many people in the spiritual field, because they are identified with the righteousness of unconditional love, say they are unconditionally loving or preach that we need to be unconditionally loving, but it is all complete denial. It is not the truth of where they are, what they (or anyone else) are currently capable of or what they are actually doing.

But, unconditional love means that a person experiences a state of appreciation, positive perception of and perspective about something so as to experience themselves as being one with that thing regardless of anything that person thinks or says or does. And we may be able to fake this on the outside (and often do), but we cannot fake this on the inside. Overall, unless you subconsciously had a child to give you something or to bolster your own self-esteem, the closest many people come to experiencing this state is relative to their own child. But simply being the parent of a child is absolutely not a guarantee of unconditional love. An unconditionally loving parent, regardless of what we may ‘say’ in society is a rare thing to behold indeed.

A conditional relationship is transactional. And the reality we have to wake up to is that 99 percent if not more relationships on the globe today are entirely transactional. This is true regardless of whether it is a relationship between two lovers, two friends, a parent and their child, two siblings or your relationship with yourself.

A love-hate relationship is nothing more than a conditional relationship (which is most relationships) because it means that when the circumstances change or conditions change, the focus of attention we have towards the other person changes from positive (ally) to negative (threat). However, even when you are feeling hatred towards that person, you want to feel love towards them instead and you do feel attachment to them. So this creates an extreme level of emotional dissonance in both parties. Sound like any of your relationships?

It just so happens that if we are only capable of practicing conditional love, the more intense our level of positive appreciation for (and therefore oneness relative to something is), the more intense pain we will feel as a result of losing that feeling of oneness and losing that positive feeling we had towards them. The more intense that pain is, the more hurt we perceive ourselves to be. The more hurt we perceive ourselves to be, the more deeply we will see ourselves as the victim and them as the threat. The more we see them as the threat and ourselves as the victim, the more we will hate them. This is why the people who loved us the most, our most avid fans, often become our greatest enemies.

We are at the point where we are practicing conditional love. We are not at the point where most of us are emotionally healed enough to actually practice unconditional love instead of try to fake it. But we are at the point where unconditional love is what we want and what we want to be able to give. And it starts by admitting that as much as you want to love unconditionally, it is in fact conditional. The question for you is, what is your love conditional upon?